Posts Tagged ‘Community Manager Appreciation Day’

This Monday was the 5th annual Community Manager Appreciation Day. A day to celebrate the tireless people that work hard (probably harder than you think) to make sure that their brand’s communities and audiences are constantly informed, entertained and engaged. And celebrated they were.

We had the fine folks on the Sysomos Reports team take a look at the social media activity around Community Manager Appreciation Day and wanted to share their results with you.

Some of the highlights you’ll see in the report include:

Community Manager Appreciation Day and the #CMAD hashtag were used over 18,000 times

Over 17,000 of those mentions came from Twitter

All of those tweets had an potential reach of 154 million eyeballs

Community Manager Appreciation Day was celebrated across all 7 continents

And this was the most retweeted tweet about Community Manager Appreciation Day:

We want to hear about your Community Manager Appreciation Day in the comments. Did you thank a community manager for their hard work? Who was it? Are you a community manager that got an awesome surprise on Monday? What was it? Let us know below.

BONUS: I took part in the 24 hours of community management panels that happened on Community Manager Appreciation Day with a panel on “community management services,” and if you missed it (because it was at 5amEST) you can see the recording on the My Community Manager YouTube page.

Today is Community Manager Appreciation Day, a day to thank the many community managers out there that work tirelessly (and sometimes at insane hours) to make sure that brands and their audiences are always getting the best experiences possible.

Over the past few years the role of a community manager has become more prominent as more and more companies see the value in having one. However, what’s interesting about the role is how it’s defined differently for every company that has one.

In pretty much every organization the day-to-day activities of a community manager will vary, but one thing will always remain constant; the community manager is a connection between a company and their audience. They act to help both the inside and the outside of their organizations and usually have a great handle on what’s going on on both sides of the fence.

This is so important in our modern world where everyone with an internet connection has a voice. Someone needs to listen to all of those voices and make sure they’re being heard. This means relaying what’s going on in the world to people inside their organization as well as letting their external audience know what’s happening inside the organization.

The community manager is sometimes overlooked as just the person that “plays on Twitter all day.” But this is hardly true. A community manager needs to be a wealth of information with their finger always on the pulse of pretty much everything going on in the world and find ways to relate that information to further the happiness of their many communities (the internal and external ones).

There’s also many ways that people can go about performing community management. Below is a presentation that I gave to open CM1, a community manager focused conference in Toronto, about a year ago. Inside you’ll find a few ways to look at how you can go about managing your community and I also give some insight into how I go about being a community manager.

So, if you work for a company that has a community manager or if you know one out there in the world, let them know you appreciate them today. Presents are always welcome, but even a heartfelt “thank you” will surely warm their heart.

To all my fellow community managers out there, thank you for being awesome and furthering our profession. On behalf of the entire Sysomos team, we salute you all.

What’s this, you ask? Well, Community Manager Appreciation Day (CMAD) was created back in 2010 by Jeremiah Owyang to celebrate the tireless efforts of community managers around the world. Community managers spend their day acting as a bridge between their company or brand and the world at large. At any given time you can find a community manager acting as the PR, marketing, sales, customer service and voice of a brand all at the same time. Today is the day we give them thanks.

Does your company have a community manager? Have you had a great experience from a brand thanks to their community manager? Today’s their day, so thank them for the wonderful job that they’re doing. Presents aren’t required (although I’m sure they also wouldn’t be turned away), but your thanks and appreciation is welcome.

Now, when I said that presents aren’t required, I meant it, but we have two for all the community managers out there anyways.

First, we have the ebook “A Collection Of Community Management Advice.” We teamed up with TheCommunityManager.com and issued an open survey of seven questions to community managers around the world. We got some great responses and put them together for anyone that’s interested in learning what it takes to be a successful community manager. Inside, you can find advice from community managers from EventBrite, Sony Computer Entertainment America, Syracuse University, Edelman, The Community Roundtable, The U.S. Department of State and more.

Our second present is also packed with useful advice for community managers, but comes in the form of a video. We had a few friends at New Media Expo a few weeks ago answer a couple of community management questions. We asked some social media professionals “What makes a great community manager?” and who some of their favourite community managers were. Check out their answers:

So to all those community managers out there making their companies better 24/7, we say thank you!

This post originally appeared on the Marketwire Blog, but we could use all the help we can get, so we’re reposting it here for a different audience.

Community managers are becoming a big part of most brands’ communication and marketing teams. Over the years we’ve seen this role expand from just a few companies to almost any company that has an online presence. Not that online dealings are the only thing a community manager is charged with, but in today’s online economy, the online aspect does play a huge role.

But don’t let me tell you what a community manager should or shouldn’t be (even though I’ve been doing it for a few years myself). We actually want to know your thoughts on being a community manager.

Today we’re happy to tell you that we’ve teamed up with TheCommunityManager.com in preparation for Community Manager Appreciation Day (which is coming up on January 28th). On Community Manager Appreciation Day (#CMAD) we want to release an ebook on thoughts, tips and advice about being a community manager and we want your help to populate it.

Below is a link to a survey that we’re asking community managers to fill out so we can highlight you and your thoughts on being a great community manager. It’s not long, only about 7 questions, and would greatly help us, TheCommunityManager.com and your fellow community of community managers. So, if you’re a community manager, please take a few mins to fill out the survey.

Even if you’re not a community manager but you know one (maybe a friend, a colleague, a person behind a brand’s Twitter profile that you love talking to) please pass this along to them.

This past Monday was the third annual Community Manager Appreciation day, a day to celebrate all the hard work community managers do that sometimes goes unnoticed. Started back in 2010 by Jeremiah Owyang as a way to pay tribute to the people that are behind the scenes of thriving online communities, the knowledge of the celebration has grown as the job has become a lot more common at many companies. Some people think that community managers are the people that play on the internet all day, but really they’re the heart of a community for a business. From my own experience I can tell you that community managers handle almost all functions of a company at some level. They can be PR, marketing, sales and customer service all at the same time. As you may guess, I do have a personal affinity for this day.

Using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics tool, I decided to take a look at just how much online talk was going on about Community Manager Appreciation Day. Since many community managers these days work in the social space, I thought that would be the best place to get the information from. Looking for the term “Community Manager Appreciation” or the few forms of the “#cmad” hashtag, I was able to find 114 blog posts, 74 online news articles, 80 forum postings and 4,744 tweets.

I then took a look at where this semi-holiday was being celebrated. The USA provided the most talk of Community Manager Appreciation Day at 55.2%. This is likely because a lot of companies have their head offices in the US, so that is likely where the community managers are also located. The UK had the second most talk with 15.8% followed by France, where there’s interesting social media happenings, at 10.2%. Canada, where this community manager is located, only accounted for 4%.

Next I pulled up a buzzgraph which shows us words that we find most connected to our search terms. Right in the center we can see Owyang’s name. He was brought up a lot in conversation as the man that first came up with the idea for Community Manager Appreciation Day. We can also see strong connections to “happy,” which was people celebrating, and “thank,” which was people thanking the community managers for doing what they do. The thing that threw me off in this buzz graph was the “23-oct.” After a little digging into it, I found that a social publishing platform company called Vitrue is holding an award for best community managers and submissions are open until October 23rd of this year.

What’s interesting is that when I pulled up a word cloud around the talk, Owyang actually takes a back seat to the community managers. He appeared in the center of the buzzgraph because he was mentioned a lot in when people were talking about Community Manager Appreciation Day. However, the word cloud shows us the words that are being used most often, and as you can see, it’s the community managers that were being talked about the most on their day.

Lastly, and the thing that makes me the happiest, was the sentiment I found about Community Manager Appreciation Day. To be honest, I’ve actually never seen this before in any analysis I’ve done. Community Manager Appreciation day received ZERO negativity. However, positive sentiment was at an astounding 77%.

As mentioned on our blog earlier this week, Monday was the 2nd Annual Community Manager Appreciation Day (CMAD). The day of celebration was the idea of Jeremiah Owyang who understood that community managers are a hard working group of people that usually do more work than most people realize, so he decided to honor them. Now, the fourth Monday of January is set aside to recognize all the effort put in by these great people.

Being a community manager myself, I had a somewhat vested interest in making sure people knew about Community Manager Appreciation Day, and I can happily say they did. Using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics platform, I took a look back to see how CMAD spread across social media.

First, I decided to take a look at some of the key conversations about Community Manager Appreciation Day. Most of the conversations pulled up seemed to revolve around thanking community managers or statements linking to articles about how to be a community manager, what the job entails and tools to help them.

A look at our buzzgraph tells a very similar story. We can see conversations about celebrating and thanking community managers. We can also see conversations about what community managers actually do including being strategists, ambassadors and the voice for brands and companies. As well, right in the center of our graph we see Jeremiah Owyang, the day of honor’s creator.

I personally witnessed some chatter on Twitter about CMAD, but when I looked at our geolocation map I found that a lot of people from around the globe were also paying homage to the community managers in their lives.

Something I found quite interesting was when I looked at the types of tweets these were. I found that there were just as many original messages about CMAD as there were retweets. I would have assumed that of the almost 4000 tweets analyzed a greater proportion would have been RT’s just passing on the message.

Lastly, from a quick look at our sentiment chart, I believe it’s safe to say that the day was a huge success.

Being a community manager can be both a very rewarding and a very trying position. A lot of us do a lot more work than most people realize, so it was really nice to see so many people recognizing that. Thank you.

So, to all my fellow community managers, I salute you, and maybe next year we can all take the day off. Oh wait, community managers never take a day off.